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WebDrive 6.0

Iain Laskey tries a simple but effective FTP tool

WebDrive is an interesting product. Its job is blindingly simple and once you’ve used it for any length of time you’ll wonder how you coped without it. In essence it allows you to map a drive letter to any FTP or web space you may have access to. Sounds exciting huh? Read on.

Almost everyone who has access to the Internet will have some free web space provided by their ISP. Typically you’ll get between 10 and 30Mb of space. Normally you’d use this for putting a web site on but many people aren’t interested in this so all that lovely space is going spare. You could use it for backing up your important files though. However, having to go through the trouble of firing up your FTP client of choice and copying the files over can be a hassle. WebDrive works by making the space on any server anywhere in the world appear as a drive letter on your PC, e.g. X:. Once installed and running, all you’d ever need to do to backup is to copy your files over to the X: drive. Very handy.

Installation

WebDrive can be downloaded from www.southrivertech.com. Installation is very straightforward as long as you know the URL (location) of your web space and the corresponding log on and password details. Your ISP will normally provide these. All versions of Windows from 95 onwards are supported, and as such, it is one of the few pieces of software that still supports Windows 95. You can map just the one drive or map different drives to different subdirectories.

We tested it with a Blueyonder cable broadband connection using the 30Mb web space provided by Blueyonder. It worked flawlessly although the asymmetric nature of most broadband connections meant that copying from the mapped drive was much quicker than copying to it.

WebDrive also integrates with Windows explorer providing additional options on the right-click menu.

Different Uses

As noted, most people would use WebDrive to connect to their web space. This could be for ease of publishing their web site. No more messing about, just drag and drop the files to your mapped drive and leave WebDrive to get on with it. You could even reverse that and provide a way to backup your web site by using a backup utility such as Microsoft Backup to copy the files from your web site to another drive or to tape/CD/DVD.

You could also just treat the space as free storage and copy your documents and other important files there. Businesses can also make use of it as an easy way to share documents across the Internet. One office could allocate some space on a server and other offices could then map drives to it allowing a cheap and easy way to share files. The result would be a cheap VPN like system. The support for WebDAV helps here as it helps provide locking support for files to ensure two people don’t edit the same document at once.

DOS Support

DOS is also supported. This opens up the possibility of writing scripts to carry out tasks. For instance you may want to write a script that calls pkzip to copy and compress your data in to a password protected zip file before copying it over to your mapped drive. A single click on an icon on the desktop could kick the whole process off while you get back to working on something more interesting.

Security

Copying data across the Internet does mean security is an issue. WebDrive supports various standards to ensure your data is kept safely away from prying eyes. SFTP/SSH and SSL protocols are supported to this end. Firewalls and proxy servers are supported in various ways including SOCKS 5 and MS Proxy 2. We were unable to test these ourselves however 

Conclusion

WebDrive is a great utility. In fairness, it is not really viable for those on modem connections although it will work. For broadband users it can be a boon though. The ability to map any URL to a drive letter opens up all sorts of possibilities especially if you are happy creating and running your own DOS scripts or want to use it in conjunction with other software. Given that it just performs a single task, the $39.95 price might seem excessive but at current exchange rates that works out at around £22-£23 which isn’t too bad at all for such a useful product. A 20 day trial version is available if you want to see what it can do for you before splashing out.

Iain Laskey

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